Thursday, April 10, 2014

Show high-resolution image during slideshow

You can view a slideshow in an album by clicking the Play slideshow button that appears above an image:

By default, the slideshow scales to use the entire browser window to show the web-optimized version of the image, as seen below.

For most people, the web-optimized version is preferred over the original. It’s a much smaller amount of data sent to the browser (around 50 KB instead of 3,000-20,000 KB). This results in faster loading pages, less bandwidth requirements, and greater ability to scale.

But some of you may prefer to see the high resolution originals. You want to see the full detail in your photographs and aren’t concerned about the larger size travelling across the wire. Well, here’s an easy edit to make it happen.

Open gs\script\gallery.min.js in a text editor.

Look for this text: Gsp.getView(j, Gsp.Constants.ViewSize_Optimized)

Change it to this: Gsp.getView(j, Gsp.Constants.ViewSize_Original)

Save and close the file.

Hit F5 to refresh the script file in your browser and take a look at the slideshow. Notice the increased detail you can see in this example (click for a larger version):

Keep in mind that if your original images are in a format that can’t be rendered in a browser (RAW, TIF, WMF, etc), this obviously won’t work. And if you have a slow internet connection or your files are particularly big, the slideshow may not work very well.